


The Past and Pending

by CherryIce



Category: Firefly
Genre: Community: serenity_santa, Gen, Post-Serenity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-31
Updated: 2005-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-14 04:30:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/145390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CherryIce/pseuds/CherryIce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mal has never carried Zoe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Past and Pending

**Author's Note:**

  * For [destroyed_radio](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=destroyed_radio).



> For destroyed_radio. Spoilers through Serenity.

It gets awful cold out in the black. When they're days out into the void, Mal can feel the chill in Serenity, feel the cold in the walls and the deck plates against his hands and through his trousers. Kaylee tells him it's all in his head, that Serenity's core temperature is the same when they're planet-bound as it is in the black.

Mal knows it's likely more than true, because he's never colder than when he's been dreaming.

Kaylee turns up the interior temperature, though, when they're any distance out. Looks at him sideways, all wrapped up in his coat, when she's down to her t-shirt with her hair all twisted up and Inara's shoulders and arms are exposed, gleaming, River's feet are bare on the deck, and Jayne has beads of perspiration on his upper lip.

Zoe wears her leathers like she wears her wedding band, habit and desperation and a line against the cold. She doesn't cry, hasn't cried.

There's a blanket that lives at the end of the couch, now. Mal put one there, to start, and Inara replaced it with a better one, soft colours and soft fabrics instead of scratchy grey wool. It's probably worth half the take from one of their better jobs, and Mal doesn't know how to tell her that the first one was probably welcomer.

They all pretend not to notice that every morning it has moved somewhat, not to know that Zoe hasn't slept in her bunk since Wash died.

*

When they were stationed on Raphael, there was a man in the Fifty-Seventh who brought his fiddle. Sat by the fire each night and coaxed out a different tune, eyes shut and lips moving soundlessly in the fire light.

"Like a cat dying on a back fence," Zoe said, but Mal'd seen her mouthing along on more than one occasion, and he remembered when she used to sing. Folk tunes and arias and hymns, but only late at night when they were desperate and tired and running low on hope, when they'd washed their hands but there was still blood beneath their nails and worn into the cracks of their fingers.

(Been a long time since I heard you sing, he told her once.

Been a long time since I saw you pray, she said, implacable, and he was first to look away.)

"Does kind of remind me of a pair of toms going at it," Mal said, settling beside her. In the shadows, Zoe was all angles and hollows and ironwood. Mal curled his hands more tightly around his two tin cups, searing the pads of his fingers against the heat. The fire in front of them crackled, hissed, smoked, just like the hundred other fires in the camp, and the fiddle played on.

"Now, I'm thinking," Mal said, and pressed a cup into her hand, "and I will try my best not to hurt myself, yes, that this might make you feel a bit better."

"Sir?" she asked, not turning her head to him, not meeting his eyes, but curling her fingers around the outstretched cup.

"I used to know a medicine woman, back home," he said. "Herbalist." Even over the smoke, he could smell the tea. "It's, um—" he paused. "It's goldenseal, elderberry, ginger, rue, and pennyroyal. For your flu."

You don't grow up on a border moon without learning something of herb craft, and Zoe never was slow. Times you should take pennyroyal, rue, goldenseal, ginger, times you shouldn't.

"There are things," he said, with Zoe looking at him, steady and stone, "that you shouldn't have to worry about."

The rue cost him dear, and if he has his way, Zoe will never know what he had to do to get it.

The smoke blew in their eyes as they drank their tea, and he thought of Zoe, rock-solid Zoe, vomiting in the dirt in the early morning light with scratches still on her face and bruised all over; and he thought it's a damn shame there were none of them left alive for him to kill.

*

There's a curious quality to the silence on Serenity, since Haven, since Miranda, since their last stand turned out to be just another line in the sand. Kaylee moves more softly, her voice more muted. Simon asks after Zoe's back more frequently than he needs to, stumbling over his words in the face of her calm. Inara buys boxes of lemon tea, cranberry, earl grey; because Book loved them and Zoe still does and the novelty makes Kaylee's face light up. Jayne doesn't seem quite like he knows how to talk to Zoe anymore – not that it ever did, but only now does it seem like he cares.

River pilots from the copilot's seat, on the left, and sometimes when Mal heads up the cockpit, he catches her talking to Wash's empty chair.

Book would have known what to say, would have known how to break the silence. Inara might, but Zoe is a stone and Inara is comfortable only with flesh and blood.

And Mal, maybe, Mal could breach the hush, but he could never fill it. The parts of him that would bring the words, that would know what to say, are long since gone. He could breach the silence and Inara could fill it, but Zoe needs both and Mal wonders what it says that Zoe, even with her love dead and her leathers and her wedding band, is more whole than he is.

It's like they're all waiting for the fallout in this soft silence that's somehow darker than it was before, as Zoe laughs too loudly with broken eyes.

*

The locker room was empty and dark, two strips of the lighting on against the gloom. Browncoat cruiser, so strips of paneling were missing along the wall, wires exposed. Hiss of the showers filled the room, covering the hum-hum-thunk of the engines.

Zoe was in the showers behind him, and he sat on the cold tiles in his bloody clothes and stared at the door. Not a sound from Zoe, not a whimper, even with the scratches he'd seen and the bruises he knows she has in places he doesn't want to picture (he never heard her scream, not once).

Alliance camp was dead by the time backup got there, dead to the man, just he and Zoe standing, leaning, sprawled, his coat around her shoulders and her bullets and his in the bodies.

They were going to get promotions for this.

Hiss of the showers, engine hum, low light. He put his head down on his arms, all dried blood and grime and exhaustion and salt, and thought of killing them again.

Hiss of showers and not a sound from Zoe.

Never a sound.

*

Mal wakes, cold from dreaming (call them dreams because they are the only sort he has these days) and restless. He wants tea, or whiskey, but Zoe sleeps light and if he sees her on the couch, all curled up with Inara's fancy blanket draped over her shoulders, he won't be much for sleep anyway.

(Last night, at supper, River said to him: "The walls don't know but they want to, so they loom. They close. They want to know, but they can't. Metal and stone, not flesh and bone.")

The hatch to Zoe and Wash – Zoe's – quarters is pushed open, warm light spilling upwards into the dimmed corridor. Mal hesitates for a second, a minute before he takes a deep breath and swings down the ladder. "Hey," he says, quietly.

Zoe is sitting on the edge of the neatly made bed, hands resting on her knees and eyes fixed on the corner. "Sir," she says. The closet door is open behind her, Wash's shirts pushed brightly to one side and boxes on the ground. They are empty. Her hairbrush is lying on the ground by the wall, hand mirror nearby and shards of glass scattered across the floor like diamonds. He wonders at the sound it must have made in the silence as it hit the wall and shattered.

"Zoe," he says and sits beside her wordlessly, because the words he wishes would come can't. Won't. He wants to reach out and pat her back, touch her shoulder, but instead he stares at her clenched fists, and her white knuckles and wonders if she's going to need to have her palms looked at when she unclenches her hands and her nails have drawn blood. "Tea?" he asks. "You want me to make you a cup of tea?"

She shakes her head. No 'no, sir,' just a tightening of her lips and a quick shake of her head, and this time he does reach out, reach out and place an awkward hand on her back. She crumples under his touch, away from it, forehead to her knees, and a keening noise escapes her throat.

He freezes then, hand still on her back and wishing that he were better at this, that he knew, that he was Kaylee or Inara or Book or – Wash, that he was Wash, and he had the words.

"Shhh," he says instead, hand on her back and eyes on the wall, because Zoe is his oldest friend, and if he lost (when he loses) her, he doesn't think that he'll be good for much of anything.

"Shhh," he says, and pulls her towards him, and she puts her head on his lap and cries, finally.

Cries through the silence and they are still flying, still breathing.


End file.
